Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Respawns and my Guild

After some thought, I think I might hate trash respawns because they are disproportionately affecting my guild.

My guild raids 3 days a week, for three hours a night, from 6:30 to 9:30. We can go longer, but there are people who have to leave at 9:30, so we have to do swap-outs.

Most trash now respawns on a 2-hour timer. That means that trash respawns in our third hour of raiding. So we're always faced with the choice of reclearing trash and extending the raid to get more attempts in; or calling the raid early. We very rarely get to end the raid on time.

If trash respawned on a 4-hour timer, we would almost never see it respawn, and thus I would not really care about respawns. Or if we raided for four hours a night, it would be an inconvience, but a relatively minor one as we could reclear and get in several more attempts before ending on time.

Is a three hour raid window unusual? I don't think so. I think it's a very natural slice of time for a more casual guild to schedule a raid. Unfortunately, it just happens to mesh badly with 2-hour trash respawns.

9 comments:

Squeeze out that extra hour, even if it is only for the benefit of consumables. With three hours of raiding, if you have the expectation that everyone is flasked, you have either one hour of people without flasks or one hour of wasted flasks.

I agree with you 100%, I don't mind wiping on a boss 4-5 times, what I do HATE is after learning what we need to do and getting into a "groove" we need to stop the raid or clear the same damn trash we did at the start. Having to clear it again poses no new challenge, it simply ruins our raiding experience. Kara is extremely frustrating for this.

Gruul is a little different, the trash can easily wipe your party if you're not ready for the instance. That's why having 3-4 pulls between main bosses is fine.

Squeeze out that extra hour, even if it is only for the benefit of consumables. With three hours of raiding, if you have the expectation that everyone is flasked, you have either one hour of people without flasks or one hour of wasted flasks.

We can't. We simply do not have the people to be able to do that on a regular basis.

Real life constraints are greater than in-game constraints. And being forced to choose between the two is very frustrating.

Three hours worked fine for us when we were doing BWL, as we could squeeze out all of our raid time. I remember that we would do things like kill the trash before Chrommaggus at the end of the night, so that we could come in the next day and start work on Chrommaggus right away.

Ugh, can't stand respawns. It isn't so much a problem (just kind of tedious) when you've got the boss you're working towards down already in the past, but when you're working on something new...I just want to call the raid many times. The morale loss from wiping on a boss can make it hard to justify pushing through trash mobs again, especially if you really need that time to work on coordination and such.

I agree on trash respawns. We work on a 3.5 hour cycle, so we get owned by respawns as well, if we're working on a progression fight.

I can understand paced encounters such as Attumen having short timers, since part of the challenge is actually being able to clear the trash fast enough to get him down before the trash comes back.

As for the rest of the trash? Trash is a nuisance. It doesn't serve any useful purpose besides burn up time, and it tends to hurt guilds who don't raid on a raid length that's a full multiple of the respawn timer.